US-Mexico gun trafficking grows

Soldiers stand guard during a media presentation of a weapons cache that includes 154 rifles and shotguns and over 92,000 rounds of ammunition, in Mexico City, Friday June 3, 2011. Army Gen. Edgar Luis Villegas said Friday the weapons were found in "a subterranean stockpile" at a ranch near the northern city of Monclova this week. Authorites believe the weapons belonged to the Zetas drug cartel. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)
— AP

Soldiers stand guard during a media presentation of a weapons cache that includes 154 rifles and shotguns and over 92,000 rounds of ammunition, in Mexico City, Friday June 3, 2011. Army Gen. Edgar Luis Villegas said Friday the weapons were found in "a subterranean stockpile" at a ranch near the northern city of Monclova this week. Authorites believe the weapons belonged to the Zetas drug cartel. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)
/ AP

A growing percentage of U.S. firearms sales are destined for Mexico — over two percent of total sales — and the illicit southbound trade in weapons is greater than previously assumed, according to a University of San Diego study released Monday.

The annual volume of 253,000 of weapons purchased for trafficking from 2010 to 2012 is nearly three times higher than the period from 1997 to 1999, according to the report.

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Cross-border trade represented annual revenues of $127.2 million for the U.S. firearms industry during the period from 2010 to 2012, the report states.

“The numbers are far higher than we had anticipated,” said Topher McDougal, an assistant professor at USD. He is one of the four authors of the report, entitled “The Way of the Gun: Estimating Firearms Traffic Across the U.S.-Mexico Border,” produced by the university’s Trans-Border Institute and the Igarape Institute in Brazil.

The study found that without demand from Mexico, 47 percent of U.S. registered gun suppliers would cease to exist. “It’s a stunning number,” said McDougal.

The report said 2.2 percent of U.S domestic firearms sales were attributable to U.S.-Mexico traffic during the recent study period compared to 1.75 percent in 1993.

The study also found that U.S. and Mexican authorities “are seizing a comparatively small number of firearms at the border” — about 15 percent of the total numbers of weapons purchased in the U.S. for trafficking purposes.

Mexico has strict firearms laws and only one gun shop, located in Mexico City, and yet gun-related violence has risen dramatically in recent years as drug trafficking organizations have battled for territory and fought with government forces: As many as 120,000 people have died in Mexico since 2006, many at the hands of guns.

“Most of these weapons are made in the United States,” said the study. “Yet curiously, an empirically robust treatment of the scale and volume of firearms trafficking from the United States to Mexico has yet to be attempted.”

The new study is based on research of federal firearms licenses to sell small arms that are carried by gun shops and pawn shops throughout the United States. One of the study authors told MCT News Service that many killings in Mexico are carried out with handguns.

The authors look at U.S. gun sales county by county, calculating demand for firearms and distance from the U.S.-Mexico border, comparing 1993-1999 to 2010-2012. The figures were used to come up with estimates of total demand for firearms trafficking, both in terms of numbers of weapons and the sales.

Previous attempts to quantify southbound flow of weapons have focused on seizures at the border, or traced firearms confiscated inside the country by police agencies.

“We wanted to see if you could statistically attribute the superabundance of (gunshops) along the border to the distance from the border,” McDougal said.

“Ongoing government efforts to regulate firearms trade and trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border are largely ineffective,” the report states. Improvements in Mexico’s ability to seize illicit firearms, “are still meager in relation to the overall volume of weapons likely crossing the border.”

Colby Goodman, an international arms expert and consultant at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., said the study “by focusing on a new approach, gives a different lens and gives us a better idea of total trafficking volume… It’s really difficult to estimate the number of weapons being trafficked from the U.S. to Mexico because it’s all hidden.”

The study recommends a series of measures on both sides of the border, including the release of data showing gun sales tax revenues county by county “to help determine and approximate number of guns being sold in specific parts of the border region.”

It also calls for the prohibition of cash transactions for gun purchases along the U.S.-Mexico border, “to help ensure that funds used to buy guns at legitimate establishments will not originate from illicit business activities.”

In Mexico, the report recommends the establishment of a Mexican gun seizure database, stating that “it would be an asset in working with U.S. authorities to investigate illegal gun trafficking.”